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Meanwhile: What is truth?

MARBLEHEAD, Massachusetts — My 5-year-old son loves the Olivia stories. Our favorite is "Olivia Saves the Circus," in which Ian Falconer's beguilingly cheeky heroine tells her class about what she did on her vacation.

She relates how she went to the circus and, because all the performers were sidelined with ear infections, conducted the entire show herself: as lion tamer, tightrope walker, tattooed lady, and so forth. "And now I am famous," she concludes.

The teacher does not look pleased and asks if the story is true. "Pretty true," says Olivia. "All true?" demands the teacher. Olivia stands firm: "Pretty all true." And though Falconer cleverly switches scenes at this crucial moment, we know she gets away with it.

Everyone roots for Olivia because she is a child, not a grown man with millions of adoring fans, millions of dollars, a movie deal and the patronage of a television deity. (Okay, Smoking Gun, so she's a talking piglet, the alter ego of a grown man who's got most of those perks. Details, details.)

More important, Olivia is a character in a book. She was invented to captivate preschoolers, people encouraged to mingle fact with fiction.

There, I've said it. FICTION.

Definition 1: A profoundly human urge that fuels and nurtures the growing minds of children, whereby they can project themselves both deep into their private fantasies and out into the bizarre world of the grown-up lives around them.

Definition 2: A form of entertainment that permits perfectly sane adults to shed the burdens of ordinary life as they immerse themselves in a drama intended, at its best, to cast light on life's most urgent questions; a drama concocted by someone you don't know from Adam who nonetheless may bestow on you a gift of consolation, catharsis or broadening of conscience, sometimes while making you laugh yourself silly.

Definition 3: A literary genre that appears to be shriveling in popularity, threatening further the already-dwindling profits of book publishers.

In the month-long fray over James Frey, one question has gone largely unexamined: Why do readers suddenly seem to prefer the so-called truth to fiction? It's a foregone conclusion that memoirs now sell better than novels, that magazines are giving short stories the shaft. Has fiction become a dirty word?

On my bedside table sit four fine contemporary books: a poetry collection, a nonfiction narrative about the fall of the World Trade Center towers and two novels.

One novel you might call historic, in that a major character is Alfred Kinsey, a made-up real guy; the other is the story of a mother whose grown daughter has gone on a political hunger strike.

Both are riveting, the first as a psychological immersion in a particular culture (ours) at a particular turning point, the second as an emotional and ethical immersion in one mother's dark night of the soul.

Would the mother's story be more "real," more "redemptive," had she and her suffering been drawn from "life"? No. When I give myself over to a good novel, I surrender to the truths fashioned from one writer's heart, mind and soul.

I do not waste a nanosecond wondering whether what I'm reading "really happened." I know that it might happen; in tandem with the author, I contemplate the consequences of the question "What if?"

Fiction writers work tremendously hard to make things that are patently untrue seem as true as possible. "Let me tell you a story that isn't true," beckons the fiction writer, "and I will show you some of the truest things you'll ever know."

A good novel is an out-of-self experience. It lifts you off the ground so that you have the sensation of flying. It says, Look at the world around you; learn from the people in these pages, neither quite me nor quite you, how life is lived in so many different ways.

A memoir says, Look at me; learn from me how one life has been lived. That solipsistic focus has its place; it, too, can move and inspire, but only fiction can give us faith that we all have the imaginative capability to understand any number of stories not our own, especially the stories of people who never would or could write a memoir.